


owl's talons clenching my heart

by kaithartic (bluedreaming)



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Depression, Gen, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-16
Updated: 2015-11-16
Packaged: 2018-05-01 20:36:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5219942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluedreaming/pseuds/kaithartic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jing Xiu pulls his head out of the oven.</p>
            </blockquote>





	owl's talons clenching my heart

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for round 2 of [kyungsooperior](http://kyungsooperior.livejournal.com).
> 
> _Dou Jing Xiu is the Chinese (Mandarin) reading of Do Kyungsoo._   
>  I wrote this while listening to [Morning Passages](http://listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=xpyC0MAoCWw) from _The Hours_ soundtrack.
> 
> _Thank you so much to Reeza for helping me flesh out this plot and Lonio for looking it over. Thank you also to the secret keepers for always holding my hands, even when I'm absent._

 

 

Jing Xiu pulls his head out of the oven.

"Was that a good idea?" Kyungsoo asks, shaking his non-existent head. "Remember why you stuck your head in the oven in the first place?

Jing Xiu isn’t listening, not at the moment. His ears are ringing, strangely, like the silence that surrounds him is filled with tiny voices, but even when he strains his ears he can’t make out the words.

Are they good voices? Bad voices? He can’t tell. The oven door, swinging up, makes a kind of sad groan before it hits the frame with a rusty crash.

"What am I supposed to do?" Jing Xiu asks, staring at the kitchen counter, at the meatloaf he’d pulled out of the oven only moments before, to stick his head in.

"The gas is still on," Kyungsoo says, reminding him; he can almost see him looking directly at him, dark eyes and purple skin puffy in the sockets from lack of sleep. "You can turn it off, or you can stick your head back in." There’s a pause, a kind of delayed regrouping. "Or you could hit the auto-starter."

Jing Xiu knows what will happen if he hits the auto-starter. The gas is on, the oven full of the gas that he knows is still in there. He can still feel it in his lungs, his heart beating against blood that’s stripped of oxygen. The thought is tempting.

He reaches forward, and turns the gas off.

Checkmate.

Except there’s no game here, and no opponent, and nothing to win.

"You’re spiralling again," Kyungsoo says,

and it’s true. Jing Xiu closes his eyes, waits for the _whirling blackness_ [1] to swirl up again, an endless tide that’s always just there, just a breath away. It’s comfortable, almost, always, letting the cold draw him down, down, down.

Down to depths, where there’s no today, no tomorrow, no yesterday. No Kyungsoo.

"You can’t decide I don’t exist," Kyungsoo says, cutting through the dark, sharp, like a knife. "You are me."

"You’re my sadness," Jing Xiu says, eyes snapping open. The air in the kitchen is still thick; he can see the leaves blowing by in the autumn wind outside, hear the scrape of branches scratching the glass, but he doesn’t take a step forward, doesn’t reach to open the window.

"We all have sadness," Kyungsoo says, sounding patient, sounding impatient, like he can’t decide.

Like Jing Xiu can’t decide. He looks at his fingers; lifting them to his eyes to block the late afternoon sun that’s begun to stream through the glass of the window; the transparent surface that looked so clear before, now against the sun is smeared with grease and dust and fingerprints. There’s so much beneath the surface. "My name is Jing Xiu," he says, but his voice sounds strange in the empty kitchen, air swirling with invisible death. His mouth is dry, and when he runs his tongue over his cracked lips he can taste the dullness of iron. 

"Your name is Kyungsoo," Kyungsoo says. "Do Kyungsoo. And even if you move away, leave everything behind, you still are who you are."

It’s true. Jing Xiu knows Kyungsoo is right. But he doesn’t have to accept it. Sometimes, when the sadness is too much, he just wants to let it go, sink to the bottom, stop trying to swim.

Take his hands off the steering wheel and watch the car angle off into the ditch.

"Your mind is a one track lane," Kyungsoo says, and it’s not an attack, not an insult. It’s a fact. "The sun is shining right now but soon it will be dark again."

Jing Xiu looks out at the sun, staring him placidly back across the kitchen counter, the meatloaf sitting on the laminate, the fly that’s begun to buzz idly around the raw meat.

It swerves this way and that, its circles growing more and more uneven, loopy symbols devoid of meaning as it crashes into the side of the pan, flipped upside down, legs struggling in the air. Jing Xiu watches, in the quiet, as the frantic motions of the legs first slow and the cease altogether, the buzzing meshing into the white static that fills his head over the deep dark sea.

"That’s how you’ll die," Kyungsoo says, "if you turn on the oven again." He sounds sad, like watching the fly die a useless, solitary death is the largest tragedy in all of existence, and maybe it is, for the fly. But it’s just a fly.

"A fly lives for a day," Jing Xiu says quietly. The sun shines through his hands; he can see the shadows of veins, beneath the surface. "It would have died soon anyway." He doesn’t feel sad, just numb. Kyungsoo is his sadness, after all.

"You can’t blame me," Kyungsoo says, "I am you."

"You’re a part of me," Jing Xiu says slowly. It’s hard to remember, sometimes, that he’s more than his sadness. Jing Xiu, and Kyungsoo.

"You’re the one who stuck his head in the oven," Kyungsoo says. "Not me."

"You told me to," Jing Xiu says. He looks at the oven door, at the rust showing through the enamel where he chipped it, the other day.

He’d been happy that day, he remembers with a sudden shock, electricity in his veins. He can’t remember why.

"You’re the one who opened the door," Kyungsoo says. He’s not angry, not forceful. He just says the things that Jing Xiu doesn’t want to hear.

"I’m the one who can open the window too," Jing Xiu says, and he reaches for the metal handle before he has time to think about it, the fresh air rushing in with a cold shock as the force of the wind pushes the window open with a bang as the handle hits the side of the wood cabinets.

As though jarred to action, his head begins to throb, the lack of oxygen finally hitting him as he raises a hand to clutch at his temple, breathing heavily; suddenly he realizes that he’s been breathing heavily all along, almost gasping, but he can’t remember when he began.

Kyungsoo is silent. Not gone, just quiet.

Jing Xiu leans his head back against the wall and breathes. After a while he notices the soft sounds he’s hearing, drifting through the window with the wind, the faint chirping of birds, the sound of cars passing by on the street below.

It’s somehow so funny, all of a sudden. The way he watched the fly die on the countertop. The way people are still passing by on the street, some probably walking hand in hand, others probably arguing about ridiculous things like ice cream flavours. There might be a person standing by the florist shop, trying to decide whether to go in, take the final plunge into matrimony. There might be another, standing outside the jeweler’s, just having discovered that the person they loved, trusted, was seeing someone else.

"We’re all flies," Jing Xiu says.

Kyungsoo nods.

They sit there.

 

 

There’s a note on the table, blotched blue ink on a scrap of white paper torn off this month of the calendar, as though the days have been removed.

_I’m sorry_

the note says. That’s all. The curtain flaps in the breeze from the open window. Jing Xiu, Kyungsoo is gone.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> 1 Sally Brown and Clare L. Taylor, "Plath, Sylvia (1932–1963)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [source](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath#cite_note-ODNB-3) [ return to text ]
> 
> The title is from a quote by Sylvia Plath, describing her sadness. [source](http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Lethal-Beauty-The-Allure-Beauty-and-an-easy-3302966.php#page-6)  
> This story was inspired in part by the poem [Sylvia Plath Interviews Her Sadness](http://nightslikerain.tumblr.com/post/121315337768) by Meggie Royer.  
> This story was also inspired in part by [the life](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath) of Sylvia Plath.


End file.
